Best Price Guide For Valuing A Collection?

With the prices of things changing frequently, a paper price guide can only provide basic information. Current information can be found through experience, like a coin shop owner, or recent sold auctions like ebay.

fenton, I think you hit the nail on the head. In the past year PCGS hired the experienced pricing expert Mark Ferguson to head their Price Guide. As a result, those prices, available for free online, are regularly updated. They represent RETAIL pricing, taking into account many auctions. When auction prices are used by a pricing guide, those auction prices realized INCLUDES the buyers premium (which makes sense).

When I price coins, I use that source along with a few others, including:

1. If the coin has a CAC, I go the the CAC website to see THEIR "retail" Price Report/Price Guide for coins with CAC's. However, they do NOT include pricing for coins with pluses (but coins with pluses are included in their pops as part of the whole grade number).
2. Using the PCGS website, I go to their "Auction Prices Realized", which allows me to apply many filters to quickly and easily narrow down my search. Their data includes the up-to-date auction results from MOST firms, such as Heritage, Stacks, Legends, DLRC, etc., but it EXCLUDES results from Great Collections.
3. I also use the Great Collections "Coin Auction Archive", which also has a ton of great filters, and also includes the 12.5% buyers fee (I think many of us avail ourselves of the 10% bp option).

All of the above data is available for free. "If it's free, it's for me!"

I hope you found this helpful.

Steve

This and NumisMedia are my preferred sources. PCGS is also a good third point of reference to triangulate a decent market value. As usually mentioned, price guides are only guides, your mileage may vary.

Thanks all. Great info.